An image may be generated by scanning a hardcopy document. An image may also be generated by a software application that converts an electronic document (e.g., a word processing document, a slide of a slide show, a spreadsheet, a webpage, etc.) into an image format (e.g., bitmap). Accordingly, an image often includes multiple hand-drawn text characters regardless of how the image was generated. The image having the text characters may be stored (i.e., archived) for a considerable time before the image is retrieved for viewing, printing, analysis, etc.
Intelligent character recognition (ICR) is a technology that identifies (i.e., recognizes) text characters in an image and outputs an electronically editable version (e.g., string) of the text characters. ICR may be performed while the text characters are being hand-drawn and thus can utilize timing information to correctly recognize the characters. However, if ICR is performed after the text characters are drawn (e.g., ICR is performed on an archived image), the timing information is not available and performance of the ICR suffers. Regardless, users still wish to perform ICR on archived images having hand-drawn characters.